Want to be more creative? Drop that iPad and head to the great outdoors.

That’s the word from David Strayer, a cognitive neuroscientist who studies multitasking at the University of Utah. He knew that every time he went into the southern Utah desert, far from cellular service, he started to think more clearly.

But he wanted to know if others had the same experience.

To find out, he first sent students out into nature with computers, to test their attention spans. “It was an abysmal failure,” Strayer says. “The students didn’t want to be anywhere near the computers.” Worse still, he says, “the light of the computer screen attracts moths and ants and things. People were having to fight insects.”